Prerequisites

Usage

Simple Project

Create a configuration file in the root directory of the project: sonar-project.properties

sonar-project.properties

Run the following command from the project base directory to launch the Sonar analysis:

Security

Since Sonar 3.4, if the project cannot be accessed anonymously, the 'sonar.login' and 'sonar.password' properties are required to run an analysis. These properties have to be set to the credentials of a user having the 'User' role on this project. You can set them either:

directly on the command line by adding -Dsonar.login=myUser -Dsonar.password=myPassword

or the 'sonar.forceAuthentication' property is set to 'false' and the 'Anyone' group has not been granted a 'User' role on the project

Project Samples

To help you getting started, for each language, a simple project sample is available on github that can be browsed or downloaded: projects/languages

Multi-module Project

There are two ways to define a multi-module structure in Sonar:

Using the given file structure...

... with the given 'properties' files

Way #1

Set all the configuration in the properties file in the root folder

"MyProject/sonar-project.properties" file content

Way #2

Set the configuration in multiple properties files

"MyProject/sonar-project.properties" file content

"MyProject/module1/sonar-project.properties" file content

"MyProject/module2/sonar-project.properties" file content

Noteworthy:

Properties are inherited from parent to childrenThey can obviously be overriden:

By prefixing them with the module identifier (way #1)

Simply by defining them in the 'sonar-project.properties' file located in the module (way #2)

Module base directory can be specified for special casesBy default, the module base directory is guessed from the module identifier (like in the examples above). But it can be redefined using the 'sonar.projectBaseDir' property.For instance, here are two use cases and the way to redefine the base directory of the modules:

the folder of a module contains white spaces or special characters:

the module is not located directly in the parent folder, but in a deeper directory structure:

A project that defines modules (or a module that defines sub-modules) cannot define a source code folder to be analyzed by Sonar.

To help you getting started, multi-module project samples are available on github that can be browsed or downloaded:

Modules with the same structure: projects/multi-module/sonar-runner/java-sonar-runner-modules-same-structure

Modules with different structures: projects/multi-module/sonar-runner/java-sonar-runner-modules-different-structures

A configuration file for each module: projects/multi-module/sonar-runner/java-sonar-runner-modules-own-configuration-file

Multi-module and Multi-language Project

Since Sonar 3.3, it is possible to run an analysis on a multi-module project whose modules contains source code from different languages.

To help you getting started, a multi-language project sample is available on github that can be browsed or downloaded: projects/languages/multi-language/multi-language-java-javascript-sonar-runner

Advanced Usage

If a sonar-project.properties file cannot be created in the root directory of the project, there are several alternatives:

The properties can be specified directly through the command line. Ex:

The property 'project.settings' can be used to specify the path to the project configuration file (this option is incompatible with the 'project.home' property). Ex:

The Sonar working directory can be set through the 'sonar.working.directory' property (default is '.sonar').

The root folder of the project to analyze can be set through the 'project.home' property. This folder must contain a sonar-project.properties file if the mandatory properties (like 'sonar.projectKey') are not specified on the command line.